Letter

Needing to reply to you, I avoid the box where my letters must go. I can drive the letters into that corral. They'll be neatly herded into words, and the commas and periods will be nipping at their heels to keep them together. The sense is apt to escape when the letters shuffle themselves around, and run about baaing and bleating. You don't need any more chaos, so the sheep I send you had better be well-behaved.

Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself--If only! I can paint pretty pictures and teach those letters to sing. Well-trained, they will arrange themselves nicely in that little box, and fill out the space with a nice pattern. The consonants will chirp their solos and the vowels will chorus in the background. But that flock of letters will bear no message. The precision of the pattern can't capture the flight of meaning.

Sense soars like a bird. Winged, it flits from one paragraph to another, alighting for a moment here and then flap! it has escaped again. Sometimes I can see it gliding in the sky, far out of reach. Sometimes it pauses on a twig beside me and gazes at me fixedly, with a beady eye. So close, I feel the air move between us. But the instant I move, it vanishes in a flurry of feathers. (One falls, and I pick it up to carry with me as a reminder: once I came this close.)

I meant to be writing to you, my words a net to carry you a message. But the net is too flimsy to carry as much meaning as you need. I'm not sure I even have such a quantity of meaning available. I have been searching through my drawers and closets, for some fragments to add to the pitiful pile I had in my head already, but the search has not borne fruit.

Still: I need to send you some words. I'll send you the scraps I could find. I'll send you the feathers I have collected over these few years that I've been chasing after sense as it flies away, leaving its song floating on the air.

I'll send you the echoes. Musician that you are, maybe you can draw the song out of them.

I keep trying to escape, fly like a bird myself. But I will sit still. I cannot pin down the sense or even the sounds, but for a few minutes, I can pin myself down, and I can write to you.

Loneliness

Fascinating idea in this article: "that loneliness [can] be contagious and follow[s] a distinct path as it spread[s] through social networks."

Morning After

I am not getting dressed today. I've been awake for three hours, but the day still hasn't convinced me that time is moving onward. I did take off the giant t-shirt and old shorts I sleep in, hours ago. But I couldn't bring myself to put on the constraining uniform of stitched fabric and seams that opens the door into the external world. I can't stand the wires and zippers today. Denim would be a straightjacket to me today. Even a t-shirt has too much shape.

Instead, I am wrapped in a sarong, folds that drape around me and a knot at my shoulder. A few tugs and the whole thing will dissolve into a pool of green on the floor. I can escape any time I want. To get out of a shirt or pants, I would have to remove myself from their shapes: squirm and pull and duck my head and bend my elbows, step out of the pant legs, ease the waistband past my hip bones. The clothes, thrown to the floor, pile up, as though they are trying to stand on their own, manikin-like. Oh, they definitely have their own agenda. They want me to fit into them, to fill them out, to be the right proportions, to distribute myself into the right places.

The sarong, though, moves around me. It is content to become the garment I want. If I ask it, it will be a simple blanket. It would be glad to be a curtain for me, it would be honored to be a veil for me, or even a shroud, if it came to that. The sarong conforms to what I already am, and if I want freedom, it will unfurl from around me and fall away--

and I will stand alone and bare--

my hair falling down my back, uncombed--

I wish I had wild curls like a waterfall, not this clean, straight flow of hair like a smooth river. I am wishing, today, for hair that tumbles and quarrels and can't make up its mind, hair that fights itself and refuses to be untangled, hair that shapes itself and becomes a sculpture.

I am a mess. Hair is sprouting from my legs, like the first grass growing in the spring. My armpits aren't clean and bare like a marble floor, but fertile like a stone grown mossy by the river. I am a meadow of weeds and wildflowers, not a garden with paths and flowerbeds.

Rain, fall on me. Sun, let me drink you in. This is where I am right now--sitting aside for the moment, just being what I feel. Just being.

Remembering: I am alive.